Changing my reading habits

Let’s face it, testing is all about knowledge. Acquiring knowledge, having knowledge, providing knowledge, sharing knowledge. I will exclude specific domain knowledge for this blog post, not neglecting it being of utmost value. This post is about testing knowledge and its acquisition. For me an important part of acquiring knowledge is reading blogs. There are two major ways I get to know about interesting new blog posts: Twitter and the blog feed at ministry of testing. I have subscribed to the ministry of testing blog feed using the gReader app on my tablet. I would copy all the interesting posts to evernote (mostly with the great “unsorted” tag attached, but that’s another topic…). And boy, there are a lot of posts coming in each day. In fact there are so many posts that keeping feed zero became quite a challenge of it’s own. One that I failed at most of the time. There were three things bugging me with the way I read the blog posts.

  • things weren’t synchronized until they ended up in evernote, which meant that I wouldn’t read the feeded blog posts on the pc, which I actually slightly prefer to the tablet (or phone for that matter).
  • I was actually just rushing and skimming through the blog posts to get the inbox close to zero
  • Because of just superficially glancing over the posts, I didn’t put enough time into reflecting what I just read
  • And that didn’t really help much with the #commentchallenge which I really tried to live up to

My solution now is to reduce the amount of blog posts, admitting that I can’t read them all, as much as I would like to and I want the feeds to be synchronized on all devices. As I use evernote as a personal knowledge database I wanted to use that one. That’s where I came across ifttt.com which stands for if this then that and lets you pretty much do that. My recipe, as they call it, is if there is a new post on a certain blog than copy that into an evernote notebook. Now I created recipes for some blogs that I started to like. And thinking about it, we are already at the solution for reducing the number of posts. In addition to my favourite blogs I also created recipes for the 5blogs blog and adventures in QA, which provide regular reading recommendations so that I get hinted at other posts outside my favourite blogs as well (and there is twitter as well of course). I also created a recipe for the ministry of testing feed as well which ends up in another notebook, which I empty regularly regardless of how many unread posts there are left in there. If I have some time to spare, I will browse that one, too, but not as intense as before.

So has it paid off? Absolutely. The reduced number of reading items allows me to read more carefully and put more thought into what I just read. I still don’t give as many comments as I would like to, but this number has increased as well. And on the other hand I don’t have the feeling that I am missing out on something as there are plenty of interesting things in the reading recommendations and floating around on twitter.

How do you organize your blog reading?